OS X: We love text expansion because it can save you hours of typing every day, and fortunately OS X offers a wide variety of apps. The downside is that they generally cost a bit and lack a feature or two another has. aText, however, costs $5 and does pretty much everything.

Intelligent Organization

The first thing you look for in a text expansion app is the ability to create typing shortcuts that you can search and organize. With aText, you can filter your snippets instantly and organize them by folder groups that have their own, specific behaviors. For example, you can make one group that expands only after you type a space and in Microsoft Word and another group that expands after any character in any app. Aside from simple organization, you can set specific behaviors for your groups as well.

Comprehensive Variable Support

Text expansion apps truly shine when you can introduce a wide variety of variables into a snipper, and aText offers the best options I've seen. Not only can you insert things like the date, time, and clipboard in a variety of formats, but aText can control cursor and keyboard positions as well. You can include snippets inside of snippets. You can create fillable forms when you want multiple variables in one snippet, which I find to be the most useful feature in a text expansion app and something aText handles almost perfectly. You can even insert images and rich text, or use snippets to run AppleScripts and shell scripts. Your options are, essentially, unlimited.

Better and Cheaper

Most text expansion apps don't carry this many features and still cost upwards of $20 (and more often than not, $40). You can currently download a free trial of aText for 14 days and purchase as license for $5 from the developer's site. While not on the Mac App Store at the moment, it'll be there as soon as Apple approves it. It's not only significantly cheaper but better, too. If you're currently using Text Expander, TypeIt4Me, or Automaton, aText will import your snippets so giving it a shot is pretty much hassle-free. Whether you're currently using text expansion or not, you really owe it to yourself to give aText a try.